On the Pine site they've posted a quick tutorial showing how to host private packages on Gitlab, in their case it's for Laravel-related packages but it would work with any project making use of Composer for package management.

Not many people realize that their choice of hosting solution could determine the success or failure of their project. Even the best code base fails to perform to its maximum potential because of a hosting solution that fails to provide appropriate support.

[...] In order to understand why many industry leaders recommend managed cloud hosting for PHP projects, it is important to understand the benefits of these hosting solutions. In effect, managed cloud hosting offers three important benefits.

These three benefits involve the offloading of the usual hassles of server management, improved security and scalability. Members of the PHP community that contributed their opinions include:

Anna Filina

Adam Wathan

Josh Lockhart

Tessa Mero

Matt Stauffer

Manuel Lemos

Check out the full article to read their thoughts on why managed cloud hosting is the way forward.

The Delicious Brains site has posted the latest part in their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series (originally started back in 2015). In this latest tutorial they update things based on the current status of the WordPress project and share some of the considerations that need to be made when self-hosting versus something like WordPress.com.

It’s been 2 years since I started writing the Hosting WordPress Yourself series, and in that time a lot has changed! If you had tried following along with the series recently you will probably have noticed that a few of the steps outlined in the articles no longer worked, or were no longer relevant. A few exciting new technologies and services have also been introduced over the last few years (e.g. PHP 7.1, Let’s Encrypt, HTTP/2) which can improve both the performance and security of your sites. As such, Brad suggested that I update the entire series to reflect what’s changed over the last couple of years.

The existing articles in this series have already been updated with the changes that follow. This article serves as a changelog and documents what’s changed in each article.

They then go through the major updates that need to be made to the previous advice covering including topics like:

The TutsPlus.com site continues their "Build Your Startup with PHP" series of tutorials with the latest part of the series. In this most recent article they move into the hosting world and offer some tips and setup options for your production hosting.

In this tutorial, I'll explore choosing an ideal hosting platform for Meeting Planner and the initial configuration of our server. I'll be guiding you through the process as I migrate the pre-launch website to a better production environment for our upcoming alpha launch.

[...] As a reminder, all of the code for Meeting Planner is written in the Yii2 Framework for PHP. If you'd like to learn more about Yii2, check out our parallel series Programming With Yii2.

They start by looking at how to choose the right hosting company for your application and abilities. For their particular needs, they opted for managed hosting (like Rackspace or Digital Ocean). For the remainder of the tutorial, they show the setup with Digital Ocean and a simple "droplet" (virtual machine instance). They walk you through the setup of the droplet, the server configuration for hosting the application and packages to install. Then they check out and set up the code for the "Meeting Planner" application and, finally, update the DNS to point to the new server.

In this post to his siteDjordje Kovacevic shares the results of his evaluation of hosting providers in the platform-as-a-service arena for hosting PHP applications: OpenShift, Heroku and Fortrabbit.

I want PHP 5.6+, so I did some basic testing of those services to pick cheep and good solution to host my blog. OpenShift because I use it and it's free for 3 small gears, it was pretty good solution few years ago. Heroku because I used it for Ruby on Rails projects and they support multiple languages (even multiple build packs for one project)! I used FortRabbit too, so I decided to test theirs new apps.

For his testing he used a simple Laravel (v5.2) application with a handful of routes - something simple just to test out the setup and deployment processes. There is a "tl;dr" of the results but he also gets a bit more in-depth on what each service has to offer and some of the pros and cons of each. He also includes the results of some basic performance testing on the instances, linking to the raw output if you'd like to run your own metrics against it.

On the Zend Developer Zone blog Daniel Berman has posted a guide showing how to use their Z-Ray plugin to inspect code running on Azure for statistics around performance, queries and errors thrown by the code.

Quick experimentation, easy collaboration, automated infrastructure and scalability, together with advanced diagnostic and analytical tools – all provide PHP developers with good reasons to develop in the cloud.

[...] The combination of Z-Ray and the Azure cloud means PHP developers building apps on the Azure web app service get the best of both worlds – Z-Ray’s powerful introspection capabilities and Azure’s rich cloud infrastructure.

The post walks you through the steps to create a new Azure-based web application, how to upload your code and enable the Z-Ray feature directly from the Azure "Tools" menu. The Z-Ray toolbar is then automatically injected into your application for your immediate profiling needs.

Rob Allen has a post to his site talking about using Composer with shared hosting, showing how to use this popular tool even if you're on a shared hosting environment and don't have direct SSH or shell access.

I've seen this sentiment a few times now, so this seems like a good time to point out that you do not need SSH access to your server in order to use Composer. In fact, I don't run Composer on a live server (regardless of whether it's using shared hosting) and it's not on my list of things to do in the near future.

What you do need is a process where you handle your Composer dependencies on your own computer where you have PHP running.

He gives two possible solutions to the problem: either commit your dependencies or create some kind of build script that can execute the Composer install for you on deploy. He gives details on both of these solutions including the process for installing the dependencies with an automated FTP script (run at deploy rather than committed).

On the Developer Drive site they've posted an article for all of the WordPress users (and other curious folks) about the impact PHP 7 will have on the current WordPress system.

It’s no big secret now that PHP 7 is just on the horizon, and with that development comes questions on how it affects sites that run on WordPress. PHP 7 is a massive update to the server-side web development language called PHP, yet it’s also going to have an impact on any PHP-powered CMS like Drupal, Joomla and Magento.

They go through some of the major changes in PHP 7 and talk briefly about what kind of effects they'll have on those running this popular CMS including:

Performance upgrades

New and improved operators

Continuous 64-bit support

Anonymous class support

They recommend that you keep an eye out for messages from your host that they might be upgrading, backing up your site to prevent loss and update your plugins/themes prior to any PHP 7 switch over.

In his latest post Coen Jacons suggests that updating PHP is everyone's responsibility - that keeping the PHP installation on your systems up to date is important for everyone, not just the system administrators.

The number one remark I heard when I launched WPupdatePHP, is that users shouldn’t be bothered with this. In an ideal world, this is true, but in reality this isn’t going to stand for long. [...] I know the WordPress core team is working really hard to get webhosting companies to update their PHP versions and I agree up to a certain level that this is the best way. It’s not the only way though. [...] This will help lower the percentage of PHP 5.2 and 5.3 users out there. There still will be people on older PHP versions who are caught out and without them knowing what is going on, nothing will change for them.

He talks about the efforts the WordPress core team is doing to try to convince hosting providers to update, but points out that while WordPress aims to run on those old versions, staying on them is a mistake. He also mentions that an effort like this is a constant thing, always changing as the PHP versions released change. He ends the post with a "call to arms" for users out there, encouraging them to get talking to their hosting provider and get those PHP versions updated.

Don’t understand me wrong, I like what WordPress is doing to get these requirements bumped, but I think it’s not enough. I disagree on the fact that users shouldn’t be involved in this. It’s easy enough for users to request their hosting platform to be upgraded. If their request isn’t heard, they should find a better webhosting company. [...] It’s been long enough, I choose to act now.

In this article, we’ll take a look at Pagoda Box, another PaaS (Platform as a Service). If you have used other PaaS in previous projects, Pagoda Box is similar to Heroku. Pagoda Box is PHP only (for now) and has a well defined architecture to start developing with PHP. Everything in PB is a component. The database is a component, the webservers, workers, cron jobs and the caching. Having such an architecture doesn’t only give you ease in development but also a control over money usage. This post will be a quick overview of this platform. We will set up a framework and look at a list of pros and cons, comparing it to Heroku.

He starts with a quick overview of the service and the features it offers (including databases, caching and the already mentioned cron and worker handling). He then gets into the creation of a sample application (using Slim) and the full deployment process. He introduces the concept of the "boxfile" before getting into his "pro" and "con" list as compared to Heroku.